If You Secretly Like Michael Bolton, We'll Know

Quartz is aptly suited to this new world. Officially tenured in the philosophy department, he works mostly in the nascent field of neural economics and recently won a Packard Foundation grant to study the brain structures involved in moral decisionmaking. He is also, by any measure, very cool. As a teenager in Toronto, he attended an arty alternative high school and drove to New York to go clubbing on the weekends. Even now, he is more likely to be mistaken for an aging lead singer than a neuroscientist, due to his double-wide leather watchband that looks like a bondage strap and black steel-toed boots that match the roots of his dyed blond hair. "I would feel kind of uncomfortable being in science," he told me once - puzzlingly, since I thought he was in science. "You know, I was just, like, a regular guy growing up, and, like, you know, big into party scenes and things like that." While in Budapest for the annual Human Brain Mapping conference in June, Quartz went to clubs or parties almost every night, including one rave in a rented ancestral castle. (When I asked him about the gathering afterward, he described it as "pretty great," adding, "We had our pictures taken with the DJ!") When not partying with the Eastern European hipoisie, Quartz lives in Malibu, just down the street from Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. Their children go to school together.

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None of this eases my mind about my likely score on the cool meter. Worse yet, it turns out that Quartz has appointed himself the test's gold standard. It is he who has determined - with the help of some art school students - where each of the 140 diagnostic items ranks on the cool scale: whether Beyoncé is a 4 or a 5, for instance, the Ford Escort a 1 or a 2. Since my score depends on how accurately I can identify what is and isn't cool, I had assumed that the coolness ratings would be much more objective - maybe generated from a random survey of the population, with the results averaged for consistency. It's troubling that my subconscious reactions will be judged against Quartz's conscious ones - particularly since I didn't actually know who Tommy Lee was until after the scan. (Back home, I Googled him.)

Set to be scanned with me are Quartz and Anette Asp, a former liaison at the Swedish consulate in LA who is now the coolhunt's project manager. Asp is even more intimidating than Quartz when it comes to personal style. Sleekly attired in a pin-striped suit with a plunging neckline and zippered sleeves, she seems to have stepped directly off the selling floor of a high-end boutique. Between her and Quartz, I feel as though I am back in some kind of high school group project, wondering, now that I've been paired with the two coolest kids in the class, why I ever decided that brown jeans and a black sweater would look good together. This time, however, I am not even running the intellectual show. As Asp hands me a bottle of Evian, Quartz waves his pen like a cigarette and notes that the virtue of the fMRI is it can't be faked. "If you secretly like Michael Bolton," Asp adds pleasantly, "we'll know."

An fMRI scan features all the excitement of an afternoon nap - except that it's noisy and you aren't allowed to move. First my head is packed into a spongy wedge, then further braced with earmuffs and a hockey mask. In the tube, amid a raucous buzzing, images begin flashing across the overhead display. Because the reactions Quartz is recording are subconscious, there's nothing to do but lie back and watch the parade. It's a rather boring one: a procession of loafers, office chairs, toasters, and washer-driers, interspersed with different kinds of bottled water and celebrities like Eminem, Madonna, and the guy who played Newman on Seinfeld. There are a few slow pitches - even the most cool-blind might suspect a powder-blue bottle of men's cologne from a label, Candies, normally found on products for teenage girls - but most of the images are more ambiguous, like the dozen pairs of nearly identical sunglasses, or the collection of unattractive handbags that might possibly be considered couture.

With the slide show complete, I am done. The analysis will take some time, Quartz explains, so I go home to wait. In the meantime, I fret over the fact that I didn't recognize Britney Spears (major anticool points) and puzzle over whether Perrier is chic or over.

Three weeks later, Asp writes to say that the results are in. I skim to the middle of the second page, where my diagnosis is buried. "Regarding your own brain, Jenn," she writes diffidently, "you are a High Cool. There was a huge amount of frontal activation in the cool condition and you are our most extreme case so far in this group!" Not only am I a High Cool, in other words, I am first in my class. Miraculously, after years of carrying a plastic bag instead of a purse and playing Boggle rather than going to clubs, my inner genius has been recognized. I am an idiot savant of popular culture.

Asp also confides the rest of the results. She has finished as a respectable High Uncool, while Quartz, rather shockingly, has turned out to be a Low Cool. (Or more precisely a "Cool Cool" which is a new subcategory of Low Cool.) It is an appalling reversal for Quartz, and I wonder how he is taking the diagnosis, which in his case seems mortal. Then I spend a happy afternoon looking over the miniature pictures of my brain and comparing them with those of Quartz and Asp. The differences are stark. In the composite slide, in which all non-cool-oriented activity has been subtracted out, Quartz's brain appears almost solid gray, the base color produced by the MRI. My brain, by contrast, has large red and yellow patches, which correspond to the successful identification of a cool object. Asp's brain also has colored patches, but hers appear only during the identification of something uncool: a cheap, upholstered desk chair; generic bottled water, Barbra Streisand. It looks like a mirror image of mine.